Nader or not

I did listen to Meet the Press in the end: it seemed appropriately suited to the task at hand: tidying up a bathroom or two.

Listening to the pre-show, i.e. Schwarzenegger, was painful enough, especially when he got to his closing comment – about the possibility of a constitutional amendment permitting immigrants who have lived here for at least 20 years to run for the presidency. (Had I the foresight to predict this possibility, I would have lead an untarnished life, just in case duty called…) Does he see himself on this path? Would you believe it, he has yet to do a single remarkable thing for California (though repealing the auto tax hike at a time of such a severe state budget crisis was pretty remarkable), and yet he is unabashedly smackin’ his lips at the possibility of the White House.

Nader, though, was even more painful, in part because he would not acknowledge the likelihood that his candidacy will have a devastating effect on the Democratic run for the White House. He is known for claiming again and again that if Democrats do not win (in 2000 or 2004), they have themselves, and not him to blame.

Okay, Nader makes one good point here: his name on the ballot cannot be viewed as the sole reason for putting GWB where he is today. Nader listed others on the ticket that also drew votes away from Gore back in 2000. So true. Basically we vote without reason or thought. Perhaps we don’t understand arrows either, thinking that they designate the person who should be eliminated from the race. And why do some voters continue to vote for people who are not even running? In the Wisconsin primaries alone, many non-candidates got hundreds of very real votes. What kind of a voting public are we anyway? We’ll vote for Nader whether he proceeds with his candidacy or not. We’ll write in our neighbor’s name, just for the heck of it. Maybe some people draw decorative arrows that lead to nowhere. We are basically voting fools. Nader wont change that. But he could maybe not go out of his way to create another opportunity for us to display our idiocy.

A book to avoid

Is it so desirable to have your book reviewed in the NYT that it hardly matters what the reviewer writes? The flip side of this Q is – why review a book in the Times of a fairly unknown author if you can find absolutely no redeeming value in the work?

There are five novels reviewed in the Books in Brief section of the NYTBR. That’s not bad – each novel gets about half a column of text. One of the books is “Something Rising” by Haven Kimmel. I had read, no yawned my way through, her first book, a memoir called “A Girl Named Zippy.” I kind of like memoirs, and I wanted to see if this one, about a very ordinary life of a girl in the Midwest, could provide some nice zip to a lazy afternoon. It could not. It was an excruciatingly boring book. Possibly Kimmel thought that she could pull out an interesting text out of the dullness of her life (“my life is so ordinary! let me tell you all the ways in which nothing significant can happen on a daily basis!”), but really, she failed. I’m sure people bought the book because it had a very sweet picture of a little girl – the type that usually appears on the cover of a book about overcoming tragic circumstances. Perversely, you grow resentful that chapter after chapter nothing bad happens.

This would not be an author primed for a return appearance in the NYTBR. And yet there she is today, with her new book under scrutiny. You would think, then, that she wrote something exceptional, but no! The reviewer writes:

The father-daughter competition is effective and unusual, but is insufficient to redeem this meandering novel. Of no help are occasional clunky sentences, their meanings elusive, their locutions dubious. Fine books have come from close study of pool hall life. ‘Something Rising’ isn’t one of them.

Harsh words! Someone was not happy to be reviewing this book. If Kimmel didn’t have any rough bumps in the road during her childhood, she’s getting them now.

It’s all about the wife

Examples of “offbeat” and/or “odd” political spouse behavior (NYT front page article on Teresa Heinz Kerry):

“Ms. Heinz Kerry has a reputation of being offbeat if not a little odd… On the campaign trail, she speaks in jarringly frank terms about dealing with grief and loss” [nc: what could you even say about dealing with grief that would be “jarringly” frank?]

“He [Kerry] routinely stood by watching admiringly as she rambled on… her flowing hair hiding her eyes..’Isn’t she spectacular?’ Mr. Kerry would say. Oddly, Ms. Heinz Kerry seems not to return the favor: when he is speaking, his wife often wears a pained, or even bored [nc: the press loves that all-American grin] expression. She says [emphasis added] it is merely the look she gets when she is thinking deeply.”

“Her ideas about healing, though, range far afield of Western science. She talks to bewildered audiences about tai chi [nc: me, I would love to see her lead a bunch of staffers in a morning round of tai chi on the White House lawn], about “embracing the tiger”—a metaphor for…confronting and accepting (grief).”

Oh, and she likes scarves and shawls.

Move over, Judith, we got another weirdo to talk about.

Correcting trash

Except on days where you pick up the wrong newspaper (thinking it to be that day’s edition), mostly what you do with old papers is put them out in a grocery bag for the recycling guys to gather up and convert into something useful, like coffee filters. When I think of people who actually save newspapers, I think of batty hermits who are later found in their shacks in the mountains, with yellowed stacks of newsprint dating back to World War I.

But blogs – as far as I know, they can go on forever. Moreover, the “archives” bar gives the illusion of saved, catalogued, and archived master work, almost as if you were letting it reside in the great library of the British Museum (which purports to have everything ever printed). The storage bar more accurately should be called “trash.”

Because in truth, what current reader ever goes into Archives? Or even to yesterday’s posts? “Oh, let me run through her life just one more time. I may have missed a nuance to the story on the first three readings...”

Well, I did just that this morning – I revisited a couple of older posts on my own blog and on one or two other blogs. Why did I do it? For one, in a moment of great impatience and lacking self-restraint, I had read most of the Times headlines and all online inserts prior to this morning, so that most of the stories were already old news by the time the paper touched the driveway. And, I seemed incapable of figuring out when Meet the Press was on TV, having never watched anything on a Sunday morning in my life. I wanted to catch Nader’s big moment and, instead, I got some odd gent telling me to act now and fill out a ‘survey’ (?) against the ACLU – an organization devoted to teaching school children about gay unions and disarming our leaders of the ability to fight terrorism (almost verbatim from the show). So it was back to the computer for me.

Looking at old posts made me realize two things:
1. I had let some hideous grammatical constructions creep their way into many a post;
2. Occasional, once spotted by me (in an unusual moment of lucidity) grammatical bloopers in others’ posts had been corrected.

Naturally, I did the thing any blogger would do, I “managed” my old posts and cleaned up the two or three that I had read and that now were making me ill (“I used that awkward phrase for WHAT reason?”).

But the question is this: what presumptuous thought was making me correct? Who cares how awful it read – once posted, it’s a done deal. Except for a few stragglers and an occasional new reader, your readership will have moved on. They are now jumping around picking up the latest from blog X Y Z, you are HISTORY until your next post.

Sad but true.

To the loyal readers who continue to log on here even after reading that bit about reclining, both in the chair and in October – you are too kind. To the blogger who went back and clarified a sentence that was cutely suspended without a context – I appreciated your effort even if, most likely, no one else did.

But I do have a new definition of pathetically delusional: “as in: going back to your archives from many months back and correcting the grammar of your old blog posts.”